Bower!

Back in the mists of time when I was a Lad and an aspirant Lout I used to attend a local annual shindig in my then Home Town.

Lichfield was my home town. Not the town of my birth because that is somewhere nebulous and unromantic, nor the town of my residence which is permanent and very far away – but the town of my formative years, mid primary to very late high-school. Important years that make or break you. Where the transition from coddled childhood transmogrifies into angst ridden teenage-hood and blooms into early adult-hood. Or at least should have done.

My Home Town, Lichfield – like an aspirant Lout but with deep seated and ancient memories blossomed once a year and put on a spectacle of bewildering hedonism. To my young eyes suddenly everything went just a little bit pear shaped.

The Town, nay – the City (for that in truth is what it is) burst into an excess of Pomp, Circumstance and Riot. The Bower!

To the pre-adolescent the Pomp was at times just plain daft – portly men prancing around in violently coloured robes of designs that were already looking a tad passé two and a half centuries ago. They also wore heavy neck jewellery and carried broad-swords that would have been useful in a normal medieval confrontation had they not been hampered by the inexplicable need to carry a school bell in the other hand. More Pomp was provided by a Procession that, from memory, comprised marching folk in a variety of uniforms; military, para-military, nurses, girl guides and boy scouts. At one time or another I was part of the boy scout section – which in essence was only distinguishable from the other uniformed branches of society by the types of flags and standards we had to carry and the number and designs of badges sewn onto our uniforms.

The excitement of the procession was however the floats; flat-bed diesel belching lorries and farm trailers dressed up and decorated; inhabited by people in fancy dress frozen in wobbly, slightly self conscious tableaux depicting various historical events or celebrating societies doing good works. The principal float was of course the Bower Queen and attendant Princes and Princesses encased in a pink and flowery raffia paper bower (ah – perhaps that is where the name comes from!). But I don’t remember a Bower King . . .

The Circumstance was all about the sudden sprouting of strange and alien stinking greasy diesel demonic engines that after a mere day or two of spawning became twisting, turning, whizzing infernally coloured machines emanating loud discordant satanic music.

They were Hideous and smelt like Death. It was Anarchic and reeked of a freedom far beyond normal life. It was Tremendous, it was the Fair and it was Magic!

The Fair was, from memory, situated in two parts of town. The Big Wheel was located at the top of a hill to the North of the town centre. A commanding position for hot-dog, alcohol and candyfloss stomachs to fuel late-night projectile vomiting on to the crowds below.

The other site for the Fair, a vast car-park expanse, contained – in contrast to the stately vertical Big Wheel - crazy horizontal whirligig monsters that spun like demented gigantic chemistry models demonstrating the relationship between atoms and neutrons in some demonic molecule that no sane teacher (and we had no sane teachers) could ever conjure up. Here you could at least escape the atomised regurgitated beer spray by sheltering in the stalls where you could win a Cuddly Teddy for your current aloof, leggy girlfriend by trying to shoot playing cards with doctored air-rifles or slinging wooden rings over carefully crafted pedestals that defied a “clean ring”.

Empty handed and tiring of these gentler pursuits you could retire to the frenetic and oh-so macho delights of the Dodgems. Dante’s Inferno springs to memory as seated in not-so womb-like vehicles (decorated with the ubiquitous odour of second hand candy-floss) you were flung around in swirling glissando’s under the crackling electric fire from the pylon contacts sliding across a highly charged electrical grid just a little above head-height – all to the sound of Satan’s Wurlitzer Waltz. I never understood if these were actually dodgems or bumpers. The latent performing artist in me wanted them to be dodgems weaving around artlessly in balletic splendour like negative attractors. But the current testosterone fuelled sportsman had them as bumpers, vicious in head-on encounters, and I think I now suffer from the vestiges of early onset whiplash, testament to many fender-benders.

Manly youths in greasy jeans and newly laundered grubby T shirts, with tattooed forearms and biceps leapt expertly (and now I think about it with balletic grace) from car to car and wooed all the chicks with rough Irish accents and I was too scared, far too scared to remonstrate because I knew, just knew that I was small and ineffectual, and not quite ready to have the shit beaten out of me!

Which brings me on to the Riot bit . . . although perhaps “Riot” is a bit strong. Remember though if you will, that period around adolescence, both sides of that awful, indefinable period where anything new, odd, out of the ordinary, faintly dodgy – was just, bloody, amazing.  Remember – at its most mundane – the indescribable delight when that pompous English teacher put his daft foot in the waste paper bin and couldn't extricate it but absurdly took offence at his predicament?

Remember the mass slippering by demented sports teachers incapable of any other form of crowd control . . .

 . . . . .remember . . .

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .remember . . . .

Remember the Bower – that time when the city burst into an excess of Pomp and Circumstance, which to the formative mind was anarchic and there was a very real feeling of danger in the air. Remember also that I talk of a time of the “Greaser” – a dark and dangerous creature belonging to a band of violent miscreants who wore leathers and rode motorbikes, and beat you up with cycle chains. The time of the Skin-heads who wore Doc Martins and clothes with fashion labels and had girl friends that were even more violent than Greaser girl-friends. The time when “Clockwork Orange” had become a popular clarion call to youthful freedom and anarchy and a fashion vehicle for local Psycho’s to parade their own form of temporary urban terror.

I remember the Bower then through the acute teenage lens of excitement tinged with that unique frisson of teen, pre-teen not quite battle-hardened anxiety that happens when a town throws off its staid mantle for a bank-holiday weekend, lifts its skirts, and does just a little bit of a very English jig. 

Reflections on Yorick

I had previously witnessed Yorick's brave attacks on a particularly vicious blade of grass and cheered him to a fine victory, but have recently observed a darker side to his character, although I suspect this is more about me than him.

He had disappeared, and as usual I was approaching the point where my pulse was picking up in apprehension of an awful event when I spotted him intent on something important under the hedge.

As I got closer he looked up as if to say – “Hey, guess what I’ve found!” And what he had found was a very small and very live mouse with a long sharp nose like a shrew – which on reflection it probably was. Yorick picked up the little beastie and walked to the middle of the drive and dropped it. The little fellow shook itself and headed with commendable courage back towards the hedge, with Yorick following giving a gentle pat, nudging it in the right direction - which I thought was very friendly. The little fellow was about to dive under a welcoming refuge of leaves and twigs when Yorick gently picked it up and carried it back to the middle of the drive – and the whole cycle started again – although I must admit that this time the mouse/shrew was a little unsteady on its legs.

" . .  the hunting instinct has to be honed". A Saturday
morning training session.

And so I left them to it and went shopping.

“And didn’t intervene?”

No I didn’t. It’s a cat thing you see. It’s a natural learning process; the hunting instinct has to be encouraged and honed. The mouse/shrew (if it ever survived) had got to learn to keep its head down when there's a cat is about. And anyway I will do anything - anything to ensure that Yorick doesn't start thinking like a goldfish.

" . . . do anything to ensure that Yorick doesn't start thinking
like a goldfish" A terrible alternative identity.

__________________________________________________________________

As an editorial note I have to add here that the following was first reviewed by Margaret who was at the time watching some awful saccharine cartoon on the Cartoon Channel. One full of bizarrely proportioned “humans” with gigantic eyes, and improbable maudlin animals talking in American accents. I watched expectantly as she finished reading my efforts and was moved beyond words to see tears streaming down her face. 

On finishing she pointed with shaking finger at the cartoon drama unfolding on the television and choked something to the effect that she felt she had just experienced the impossible. That she’d  read something worse than a Disney script. Beyond this comment I could get nothing more coherent other than gulping sounds and silent mouthing.

As I forced her head into a brown paper bag in an attempt to regulate her breathing it slowly dawned on me that she thought that this was basically crap. However unbowed and unabashed I reproduce it now almost in full. And it was after all only the very last bit over which she lost control.

It is dark and stormy at the closing end of another largely pointless Sunday. It is 6pm and the sun has set. The last vestiges of the day starkly outline the mountains. The foreground is pitch and the sky is a narrow band of steely, aquamarine, framed with battle-ship grey clouds. The air is absolutely still, pure and clear.

"The foreground is pitch and the sky is a narrow band of
steely aquamarine . . " Another one of those boring old
African skies!

Yorick is sitting on a bench on the stoep. Front legs curled in front and under him in the way that only cats can do. Haunches sticking up behind him. He looks compact, contained, almost dreamy. I swear that he is also looking West at the fading view.

I sit beside him, not too close; he dislikes a full frontal affection attack.

He looks at me, and I at him. I tap my fingers on the bench in front of him– a kind of “I’m here” message. It’s a sort of man thing.

He unfolds into a bone crunching elongating skeletal stretch. Standing on the tips of his pads his skin ripples from head to tail which seems to quiver in relief. He moves, stretchily, towards me and paw by careful paw steps onto my lap. He stands, he sits, he lies down. Head heavy in the crook of my arm. Head suddenly up again in response to one of the few discernible sounds in the early evening air – the dull thudding “plut” of a wet tennis ball on concrete as Hamlet pleads for yet another throw. Yorick looks disdainfully at the dog, who retreats, cowed by the acid serenity of the cats gaze .

I look down at Yorick and see that the oil stain round the back of his neck has still not come off. Testament to his experiments with car mechanics on the underside of the hearse (don’t ask).

 

"Front legs curled in front and under him . . ."

We listen, Yorick and I, to the few other sounds at the end of the day. Distantly a single dog barks, insistent and alone. As counter point, from a completely different quarter, comes frantic puppy yelping that suddenly and suspiciously stops. A lone car comes up the road from below and briefly illuminates the end of the garden with its headlights and then accelerates past us.

Close by a woman is singing. A strong vibrant voice – something with a religious theme, a maudlin melodramatic minor keyed devotional number. Closer still the front gate clatters as Zodwa returns from home or church. Suddenly a toad winds up into a rasping mating call, and in front of us again, the “plut” of a wet tennis ball on concrete. The closest sound of all is a purr of contentment.

Yorick stretches up and gives me a little nibble on the end of my nose, and my eyes mist over.

It’s a man thing you see.

"Its a man thing you see" Yorick and I in a private moment
of bonding.

Ghosts

We are in a landscape of ghosts in the Khumbu Valley and some of these are ghosts of my own making.

As a boy I read and dreamed of the great heroics of men who conquered all the extremes that nature could throw at them. The Edwardian gentlemen who set out to be the first men at the South Pole, failed but remained stoical to the last. The idea that you could ‘conquer’ the highest mountain in the world wearing the sort of clothes that the Duke of Argyle ceremonially dons when bagging the first pheasant of the season on a windblown Scottish estate is somehow irrepressible heroic; daft but heroic.

Towards Thokla Pass. Not exactly good pheasant country.

My latter day heroes were (and indeed remain) Bonnington, Brown, Haston, Tasker, Whilans; all of whom were forging new routes and undertaking grand Alpine and Himalayan endeavours as I was tentatively rock climbing in England and Wales on the Roaches, Ilkley Moor and Llanberis Pass and dreaming of far greater technical alpine adventures. Those ghosts are here now with me – in the Himalayas; and among them are the spirits of Mallory and Irving. Great inter-war adventurers who may – or may not have summited Everest in 1924. The great Everest mystery; the stuff of true heroism.

But here there are also modern ghosts. At Thokla Pass (4,830masl) at the end of a long climb from the toe of the Khumbu Glacier there is a collection of memorials. Rock pillars, shrines, and Chorpa.  This must be the highest memorial park in the world – and because it does seem to be unplanned it has a particular poignancy. There are memorials here to many dead. I hesitate to say victims because there is no one whose life and death is thus commemorated who has not chosen to be here.

"Rock pillars, shrines and Chorpa." This one is for Scott
Fischer who died during the May 1996 Everest disaster.

They are all sad, but one stands out –

Babu Chiri Sherpa had by the age of 35 summited Everest 10 times. Two of those summits had been achieved in the space of a fortnight. In 1999 this extraordinary man spent 21 hours on the summit without oxygen. As if this were not enough he achieved the fastest ever climb of Everest by summiting in 16 hours and 56 minutes. Clearly in order to achieve such heights Babu Chiri must have exhibited particular care and attention to his own survival, yet, on his 11^th ascent, he succumbed to a fall of 200m into a crevasse while taking photographs. This accident occurred at camp II, a mere 6,500 masl.
.

"Are you all right?" "Yes, I'm just trying to take it all in." A
moment of contemplation at the highest memorial park in the
world.

I sit on a rock high above a flat floored valley. The valley floor is brown with isolated patches of green. Waist high walls of loose rock form a tracery of fields protected from grazing Yaks. Towards the head of the valley the sandy grey of a terminal moraine at the toe of a glacier is piled up, softer and rounded in contrast with the rest of the landscape. The far wall of the valley is steep and hung with frozen waterfalls of impossible colours which squeeze between bleak, black rock. The ice is an impossible translucent blue-green with the freshness of pure peppermint. 

Frozen waterfall of pure peppermint

As the wall of the valley rises the snow becomes more visible covering all but the steepest rock surfaces and because the mountains are so steep there is more rock than snow. The mountains are gigantic broken teeth, cracked and chiselled and magnificent in their height and distance. Here, in this valley, and beyond, and in the sentinel mountains there are ghosts and spirits that tell stories of beings and ideas that have only been partially written. The enormity makes me shiver.

" . . . . gigantic broken teeth, cracked and chiselled . . . . ." 

Then there is an entirely unexpected vision from a past time.

The elevation is high and the road steep, toiling up to Thokla Pass where, although we do not yet know it, we will see the sad memorials to past ghosts. It is cold and we can feel the wind chill factor in the air. We are spread out and mixed up with porters, Yak trains and the one other trekking party on the path.

I look up and see an imposing Gentleman descending towards us. He is a large figure, even in this landscape. I realise with an exquisite shudder that this presence is so striking because he is so incongruous. Amongst trekkers and porters who are colourfully clad in the finest reds, yellows and blues that mountain equipment shops can sell, and alternative Chinese manufacturers can provide, this fellow is dressed in worsted cloth of what I must assume is the finest that can be had, is the colour of burnt umber and suggests ‘Burberry’ rather than ‘First Ascent’ ‘North face’ or ‘Hi Tec’. His boots are battered brown leather that have beaten many pathways. In contrast to a light aluminium retractable trekking pole he wields a wooden walking stick that must be of cherry, or hickory, or beech, or some other romantic European Edwardian hardwood. I wish that I could remember what his headgear was – I know it was not a deerstalker – although it should have been. Perhaps he was bareheaded.

This vision offers in a dark brown resonant voice entirely in keeping with his stature the friendly information that it is a lot colder “up there” gesturing from whence he has descended. I so much want to ask him his name, but my throat has suddenly dried. I want to say to him – “Sir, are you by any chance named Irving or perhaps even Mallory? And if by any chance you are either of these two gentlemen I wonder could we have a little chat because there are a couple of questions I would love to ask you.” I don’t, I can’t, but nod breathlessly to him as he stands to one side to let us pass. “Namaste” and “Dhanebhat” is all I can manage.

"It's a lot colder up there"

A few metres further on I turn to look down on this large shambling tweeded figure descending the steep broken path. I can’t help thinking that perhaps there really does go the temporal spirit of Irving – or Mallory; released by Sagarmatha after ninety years of incarceration. Whichever one it is has finally scraped together all the necessary molecules and scraps of DNA to re-construct himself and return from the ultimate mountain. And if it is Irving, is Mallory just behind? Or did Mallory make it out a couple of days, months, years or decades earlier?

I truly hope that it was one or the other, and I am happy that I will never meet the kindly avuncular man again because I would be duty bound to ask the question I did not have the courage to ask this time and do not want to be disabused about him. And as a matter of interest, much later, when questioned about this fleeting incident Lavern remembered thinking that the man had a familiar face but could not place this feeling of familiarity, or for that matter whether he was wearing a hat . . .

Just another ghost.

"Just another ghost". Although this is a real very high flying
White Necked Raven flying like Iccarus into the sun above
Lhotse